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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Shadows cast from Victoria's capes and bays
This is from the
Spirit, seen from space
The HiRISE instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter really is a spy camera in space. Check out this sequence of nine images from the HiRISE archives, which Doug Ellison pulled together into an animation covering more than a year of Spirit's mission.
Opportunity watches the clouds drift by
Opportunity is now following a rather leisurely autumn schedule, according to the latest update on the mission website. Some of the work Opportunity is doing involves staring skyward, looking for patterns in the clouds that pass overhead at this time of year. One of the guys at unmannedspaceflight.com has put together some nifty animations of the wispy cloud patterns.
Antares tours Saturn's rings
Antares dims and brightens as it passes behind the rings as seen from Cassini in this animation.
"Return of the Falcon," a new animation of the Hayabusa mission
JAXA has released a 30-minute video of the Hayabusa mission,
High tau for Spirit and Opportunity
Over the weekend I fiddled with the
Dione's south pole
Cassini got a nice
New Horizons sees Io erupting!
There were two new pictures posted on the New Horizons Science Operations Center website this morning, of Io, and if you enhance the images a bit, there are two clear volcanic plumes visible on the limb -- Tvashtar and Prometheus are active!
A new way to darken Iapetus
Iapetus is one of the many fascinating bodies in the Saturn system.
A cool Cassini ring plane crossing animation
Another recent, cool set of images that came down from Cassini was a series taken last week as the spacecraft crossed the ring plane.
New Horizons' raw images are now online
I got an email from John Spencer this morning telling me that the mission had posted all of New Horizons' most recently acquired images on the mission website.
New Horizons spots Pluto!
Yesterday the New Horizons team released a flicker animation showing the spacecraft's first sight of Pluto, using the LORRI long-range imaging instrument.
The official publication on the second Titan RADAR swath is out
Today Nature published an article titled
The Orbital Dance of Epimetheus and Janus
Saturn is surrounded by a crowded family of rings and moons, and two of those moons -- Epimetheus and Janus -- orbit Saturn so close together that it seems as though their different orbital speeds should make them crash into each other.
Cassini, Day By Day
I've just resurrected a feature on the site that has been lost since our redesign: the
Animation from Cassini's approach to Dione
The images from Cassini's Dione encounter yesterday have started coming back, and there is a really cool set of 16 pictures of Dione and Rhea.
An animation of Itokawa from Hayabusa
This lovely animation of Itokawa represents 20 individual images taken between 18:10 on September 5 and 00:30 on September 6, from a distance of less than 700 kilometers away.
Images from the August 2, 2005 MESSENGER Flyby of Earth
On August 2, 2005, MESSENGER flew by Earth at an altitude of a mere 2,347 kilometers above Mongolia.